Drinking over the limit

The minute kids leave school and enrol in a college somewhere outside of their place of birth; they feel this rush of independence. Independence is something that is often misconstrued; people have this misconception that living on your own is the same thing as being independent. But there is a huge difference between the two things. Our topic of discussion today is not about being independent or not, but about a relevant after-effect of having a lot of freedom during your early to late twenties. If you haven’t guessed it yet, we are talking about binge drinking and the repercussion of what is a common young adult behaviour.

When it comes to binge drinking, men and women in their twenties vary. We are not sexist or anything, but research has shown that men in their twenties tend to exploit alcohol a lot more than women do. And when it comes to binge drinking, young adult men tend to take things too far. With the hustle and bustle of the urban world; stress plays a huge contributing factor, be it educational or occupational stress. People in their twenties tend to go through the motions during the week and then turn to alcohol during the weekend. But the sense of moderation is put aside due to both the naivety and inexperience of youth. Women are not far off either; a new study has shown that men build a greater capacity to alcohol than women, but women indulge as much as men during the weekend.

The biggest sufferer of these binge drinking sessions is your liver; the liver is known to be able to filter out only one unit of alcohol every hour. The mechanism cannot be made to work faster, and the amount of pressure to function optimally is extremely high on your liver. Your liver is constantly under pressure trying to filter out the alcohol and is not helped by your lack of water intake either. With more and more alcohol being filtered, the body slowly starts to lose a lot of water. The dehydration then puts a heavy toll on your body the next day, hence the bad hangover. So remember that when you wake up from a night of partying; the only reason that you are set for a bad day is that you didn’t have enough water in your system.

We have all been there when it comes to drinking and binging during our twenties, but a truly independent person would take responsibility for his or her actions and ensure that they are never overboard. We wrote this article to shed light on what has now become a norm among young adults and to emphasise the importance of moderation.